I'll probably lose some readers because of this chapter - it certainly happened the last time I went dark - but what the heck, this is my fic and I have to write it the way it comes to me. I can only stay in the realm of heat and humor for so long, it seems.

But if reading about suicidal thoughts isn't your thing, then maybe don't read this?

They'd had sex three times.

After the first time they had barely caught their breath before starting to make out again, and this time Sky had been on top, she had ridden Hawk until they'd both come, the orgasm so fricking hard it had made him almost black out.

Then they had ordered the pizza, because Sky had said she was hungry, and they had eaten it half naked in the living room while watching some movie that Hawk now couldn't even name since they had never finished it, finding each other's bodies a lot more interesting than anything on the TV screen. They had almost ended up fucking on the couch without a condom - Shit I can't let myself slip like that again, the last thing I wanna do is to get her pregnant! – but Sky had been the smart one and asked if he wanted to go back to her room to get the fricking condoms, or if he wanted her to suck his dick instead.

Well, that hadn't been a hard choice.

She had knelt on the floor before him, as he'd been sitting on the couch - and he had come almost instantaneously, feeling her slick lips surrounding his aching cock. Fucking Hell it had been so awesome it had left him a shivering mess, shattered in pieces.

He definitely wanted to do that again.

But then again, he wanted to repeat every single activity they'd done tonight, and there were still many other things to try too–

"What are you thinking about?" Sky asked, interrupting Hawk's wandering thoughts.

They were in her bed, the curtains were closed as it was night already and soft darkness surrounded them. They had both showered, and as Sky lay on Hawk's arms, her head resting on his shoulder, he inhaled the scent of her moist hair, the strawberry shampoo, with every breath.

"All the sex we had and all the sex we're gonna have," he replied, deciding not to lie about it. He was too fucking spent to get a boner at this point, so it was talk only anyway, at least for now.

"Happy?" she asked, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

"I've never been this happy in my whole fucking life."

Sky's head rested on his shoulder and her hand was on his chest, palm flat against his skin as if feeling his heartbeat under the layers of muscle and bone.

"Me too," Sky replied softly. "I'm so happy that it makes me scared."

That made Hawk turn his head so that he could take a look at her, but it was so dark he barely saw her expression. "What are you scared of?"

"The happier I am, the more I've got to lose," she simply said. "Life has a wicked way of taking away the things I love."

"I'm not going anywhere," Hawk said, sudden emotion making his voice raw. He wrapped his arm tighter around her, placed a kiss on top of her head, and she relaxed, her naked body fitting against his like it was meant to be.

They were silent for some time, Hawk's mind drifting back to sex, to all the things he wanted to do with her tonight, wishing himself not to fall asleep because that would be time wasted. Or maybe the sex would have to wait until morning, because he really was quite spent after three orgasms…

"Do you think it's weird that I've never mourned for my mother?" Sky asked then, out of the blue - her trail of thoughts clearly very different from his.

"No, I guess," Hawk said, clearing his throat. "Well, I don't know. Why do you ask?"

She shrugged. "Because when people hear I don't have a mom everyone acts like it's a huge tragedy. Literally every psychologist I've ever talked with, thinks that's the main reason behind my issues."

Hawk pushed off the lingering thoughts of sex and tried to wrap his mind around the things she had just said.

"Who cares what others think?" he asked, running his fingers through her hair. "Do you feel like it's a tragedy?"

"Not really," she replied silently. "I mean, I know it was really hard for dad when Mom died, but I don't even remember it. I remember nothing about her, I was like one and a half when she passed."

Hawk briefly thought about the wedding photo he'd seen in the living room, the picture showing Mr. O'Brian as a young man, wearing an ill-fitting suit, his blond hair reaching his shoulders, and Sky's Mom wearing a pretty, white wedding dress which didn't hide her pregnancy. But baby Sky in her mother's belly wasn't what had caught Hawk's interest in that photo - it was the way Sky's dad was looking at his newlywed wife - the look on his face pretty much the same that Hawk had when he even thought about Sky. Disgustingly in love, Aisha had said when she had seen that look on his face, and that's what it was, he couldn't deny it.

A sudden pain flashed through Hawk's heart, a fear that something bad would happen, that life would throw a wicked curveball at him and take Sky away—

Would he even survive a loss like that?

Hawk seriously doubted it.

"Has your dad ever dated anybody else?" he asked to get something else to think about.

"I really don't know," Sky said. "At least he's never brought anyone home. I remember asking him about that when I was like 10 or something and I had this phase where I hoped he'd marry someone so that I'd get a mom and people would stop asking stupid questions about our family," She paused for a while and when she continued, her voice was serious. "He told me that when mom died she took his heart with her, and that he could never love anyone again."

"Wow," Hawk said. "That's kinda… dramatic."

"But true, I think." Sky replied softly. "I only understood it when Kat died, though. How it really felt like there was a fucking black hole where my heart should've been."

Hawk felt her sorrow like an arrowhead in his own heart. He hated it when she got sad like this, hated it with a fiery passion, and he would've done anything to make her not sad. But still, he thought this was an improvement. Lately, Sky had been able to talk about Kat's death without starting to cry, or even worse, falling into one of her violent flashbacks.

He held her close and kept running his fingers through her hair. He still hadn't figured out the right words to say when she talked about Kat, though. 'I'm sorry' felt like such an understatement.

"What do you think happens to us when we die?" she asked after a short while, her question making him start.

"I don't know," he replied.

He was Jewish, but he wasn't really sure if he believed in all that. He had a rather scientific mind, and he had always been inclined to think that after death, there was just… silence. Like an endless sleep without dreams. Anything else just seemed kind of childish to him. He didn't want to say that to Sky, though. She wanted to believe she would see Kat again, and who was he to say she wouldn't?

"Have you ever thought about it?" Sky asked silently. In the darkness, he barely saw her face as he glanced down at her.

"About what?"

"Death." A short silence. "Taking your own life."

Hawk's chest tightened.

This was something he had never talked about, not with anyone. Not even Demetri, when Demetri had been his only friend and had seen what he went through every fucking day.

"Yeah," he admitted after a couple of heartbeats. "I used to think about it a lot."

"When you were bullied?"

He gave a silent nod.

Oh, had he thought about it? For years it had been his constant daydream. How he would kill himself so he wouldn't have to endure one more day of the cruel words, the anonymous messages calling him a freak or a monster, telling him he'd be better off dead. He had planned it all, his death, his suicide letter, his funeral - he had hoped people would cry and they'd feel sorry now that he was gone, but a part of him had known even then that nobody would really be sorry to see him gone except for maybe his parents and Demetri. The bullies would have thought of his suicide just as one more proof of him being a total loser.

Hawk didn't like thinking about that.

It was in the past, he wasn't that kid anymore. All that rage, all that anger he'd had inside - well, it wasn't gone, but he didn't want to harm himself anymore. In a way he had already done that, he had killed Eli. That kid was dead and gone, nothing of him remained in Hawk.

"Why didn't you?" Sky asked, poking at these painful memories, stirring the line between past and present, between Eli and Hawk.

Hawk swallowed, his throat thick. "I guess I was just too much of a pussy to go through with it."

Sky didn't say anything. The silence wrapped them in a soft cocoon, her hand was still on his chest, her index finger tracing small circles on his skin.

"When Kat died, I tried to kill myself," she said then, her voice barely more than a whisper. Hawk's heart jumped to his throat, he felt like he would choke, like the weight of her words would crush him.

"What—?"

"It was a couple of months after that. Last summer. I overdosed on painkillers."

Hawk turned to look at her, but her hair hid her face from him, and in any case, it was too dark to see clearly.

"Seriously?" he asked, barely getting the word out.

She gave a shaky nod. "I just… I didn't wanna live without Kat. I just wanted it all to end."

Hawk was silent for a couple of heartbeats.

"Do you still want that?"

"Not since I met you."

"Shit, Sky—" Hawk breathed, his voice getting caught in his throat. "Don't you ever fucking do that again."

"I'm not gonna. I was... It just felt so fucking hopeless. It was like being stuck in darkness, and I couldn't even remember what light looked like. I felt like I was already dead, and this life… it wasn't real. And I didn't think it would ever get better, so I just… one day I just thought that fuck this shit, I never wanna wake up again. And then I just did it."

Hawk took a deep breath, then another, but it didn't really help. He thought about last fall, about the first time he had seen Sky. She had walked into the school cafeteria with her high heels and her short skirt, her hair flowing in the air around her beautiful, confident face. He had thought she was one of those rich, pretty girls who had their whole perfect life laid in front of them on a silver plate. Those girls whose whole life revolved around makeup and pretty clothes and social media, and who knew nothing of that dark place where he had been. The dry well, filled only with dust and darkness that sucked the life out of a person, that black hole where nothing existed but a wish to die.

He never would have guessed Sky had been in that place too. That she had tried to take her life just a couple of months before that day in the cafeteria. Now that he thought about it, it made him sick to his stomach and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. How fucking close they had both been to death.

Had Sky managed to take her own life, what would his life be now? If he never had met her at all? Would he even be alive anymore?

"What happened?" he asked silently, his fingers playing with her hair. "How come you… aren't dead?"

"Dad found me," Sky said, her voice almost inaudible. "And that… well, waking up in the hospital and seeing the look on his face—" She paused and took a shaky inhale. "I never wanna see that again."

"He loves you, you know."

"I know."

"And I love you," Hawk's voice came out low and throaty. "So please, never even think about doing that again—"

"I won't," she breathed. "You don't have to worry."

"Come on, how can I not worry after you tell me stuff like that?"

"I'm sorry," she replied. "I just felt like… I didn't wanna hide it from you. I should've told you a long time ago."

"Yeah, you should've," he said but didn't press on it. Because he hadn't told Sky either, he hadn't told her about the anger that had almost consumed him, about the violent dreams where he killed either himself or then everybody else, the dreams where he made this world drown in blood for the things it had put him through.

He never would tell. He didn't want her thinking about him like that, as if he needed her pity.

Sky was silent for a long time after that, and Hawk didn't say anything either. The darkness around them was soft, her hand on his chest was small and warm and he felt his heartbeat under it, steady, strong, every beat for her, only for her.

Suddenly Hawk knew with breath-taking certainty that he would never love anyone else. That there could never be anyone like Sky, that there would never be nights like this with anyone else, there would never be silence as soft and as profound as the one that surrounded them, that his heart was so full of love for her it would stop beating if she ever left him, and if she ever died, he would die with her.

He pulled her closer to his chest, his throat so tight his words came out raspy and low when he spoke.

"Tell me you love me," he breathed, his lips brushing her hair.

"I love you," she replied softly. "I love you more than anything."